Protect yourself from stress
BY Cynthia lee and stuart wolpert
UCla today
You’re sweating bullets just before you give the most important presentation of your career to senior managers, or your heart is pounding as you’re about to step into the middle of the latest crisis at work.
No matter what brings on the stress, David Creswell, an advanced graduate student in psychology, has some advice about techniques to protect yourself biologically and psychologically from the harmful effects of stress, based on his research.
Take a few minutes before you speak or act to reflect on your values or qualities that you’re proud of.
Pondering these value affirmations or regularly writing them down in a journal are ways you can blunt the damage of stress attacks.
“It doesn’t matter what your values are or whether they are religious, social or political values,” said Creswell. “We found in our research that value affirmation exercises can be effective in reducing the adverse effects of stress.”
Oddly enough, Creswell’s research into stress-relief techniques suggests that these value affirmations work better if they are completely unrelated to the stressful situation.
“If you’re going to give a speech to your colleagues, it’s probably going to be less effective if you start thinking about your ability as a public speaker,” he said. Instead, think about what a good poker player you are, if that’s important to you, or how good you feel about serving breakfast to the homeless once a month.
“Our study shows that reflection on personal values can buffer people from the effects of stress, but the implications are broader than that,” said Shelley E. Taylor, a professor of psychology, an expert in the field of health and stress and Creswell’s faculty sponsor and mentor on the project. “Any positive self-affirmation can act as a buffer against stressful events; that can include values, personal relationships and qualities that are a source of pride.”
In Creswell’s study, 80 UCLA undergraduates were put through two stressful exercises. Before they began, however, one group was asked to reflect on values they had identified in advance as being especially meaningful to them and to answer 10 written questions about them.
Then all the students were asked to deliver a five-minute speech and do mathematical calculations under conditions that were deliberately made more stressful.
The researchers found that those who reflected on meaningful values, regardless of what they were, had significantly lower cortisol levels in their saliva. Cortisol is a hormone that is released during stressful events. If the body produces excessive amounts over time, cognitive impairments and increased risk of disease can result.
“When we go into a stressful situation, it’s often hard to take a break to think about values. It’s not easy to do,” Creswell warned. “But just giving yourself a couple of minutes to do this may be an effective way to combat stress.
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